RUNNING TIMES

The Most Likely Return of Boston Billy

Nearly 30 years have passed since Bill Rodgers won his fourth and final Boston Marathon. Now, after battling cancer, he's ready to run Boston again, and prove once more why he is the People's Champion.

For six years Bill Rodgers dominated the Boston and New York City marathons like no man before or since, winning each race four times between 1975 and 1980, a run of excellence that ended—inevitably—in a hastily found bathroom in Hopkinton, Massachusetts. He met his Waterloo in a loo 20 minutes before the start of a Boston Marathon sometime in the 1980s. Rodgers cannot recall the precise year, though this much is certain: With 7,600 runners and as many expectations pressing at his back, he felt a sudden and irrepressible need to find a toilet. This was not an uncommon problem for a man of his prodigious dietary indiscretions. "Bill ate a pork chop from the back of his fridge a few days before one Boston, not bothering to notice it was green," says his friend Greg Meyer, the last American to win that race, in 1983.

In his competitive prime, a postrun repast for Rodgers meant sticking a fork in a jar of peanut butter and then plunging it into a bottle of bacon bits.

"I brought a friend to see him after the race one year, and the friend couldn't believe that the guy who had just won the Boston Marathon was spooning mayonnaise onto a pizza," says Amby Burfoot, who won Boston in 1968 while a senior at Wesleyan University, where he and Rodgers were roommates.

"I'm a bit of a scavenger," Rodgers told me one day last fall while eating five-alarm chili from a Styrofoam coffee cup in the cafeteria of the YMCA in Southington, Connecticut. "As a poverty-stricken runner, you'd go to dinner and stick the rolls in your pocket to take home."

All of which is to say this: On that long-ago April day in Hopkinton, Bill Rodgers—"The only man who has ever run 150 miles a week and still had high cholesterol," says Meyer—had to use the bathroom.

Mercifully, Rodgers knew a dentist whose house was under renovation 100 yards from the starting line. He ran there, abruptly did his business, and turned the bathroom doorknob to leave. But the locked doorknob just spun in his hand.

"It was quarter to twelve, and no one knew where Billy was," says Dave McGillivray, who is now the race director of Boston, but at the time was a teammate of Rodgers's on the Greater Boston Track Club.

Rodgers was locked in a bathroom moments before the start of the race that had made him famous—an anxiety dream sprung to life—when a funny thing happened: He was seized by the unexpected calm that comes over people in the latter stages of drowning.

"All of a sudden I was like, 'This is okay,'" Rodgers remembers. "I didn't really care that I was locked in. In fact, it was better that way. I wouldn't have to race. I remember thinking, I don't know if I really want to go out there."

"I did get out and run the race, but it was a sign, mentally, of how I felt about marathons. I think I was just getting worn down and losing my desire. All that time, you know? All that wear and tear."

Last summer, Rodgers was eight months removed from prostate-cancer surgery and 13 years removed from the last time he had finished Boston when he said to me, haltingly, almost apologetically: "I'm thinking of getting ready to run Boston in 2009." After a pause, he added, "We'll see how I'm feeling. I'll have to decide by December."

This year marks three decades since he last won Boston and New York in the same year, when his fame peaked and he became an alliterative icon of the Boston sports scene, a bridge between the Splendid Splinter and Larry Legend: Boston Billy.

Back then, to his bafflement, buses would pull up to his curb in suburban Sherborn, Massachusetts, and disgorge Japanese tourists taking pictures of his house. The Japanese baseball slugger Sadaharu Oh once materialized on his lawn and posed for a picture with the bewildered homeowner.

Elite runners from around the world asked to run the streets of Boston with him. Meyer often joined Rodgers on those runs and remembers the pride that blue-collar Bostonians felt for one of their own: "Heads would literally pop out of manhole covers and yell, 'Kick their asses, Billy!'"

At 61, Rodgers says—if he ends up running—he has no intention of kicking any asses this year. His friends hope that he's telling the truth. "I think it would be the greatest thing in the world if he'd allow himself to run Boston slowly," says Burfoot. "Nobody would care, except for the six blowhards who would say, 'I beat Bill Rodgers.'" This is a common desire among Rodgers's friends and family, the wish that he would slow down.

As a boy, Rodgers chased butterflies with a homemade net in a field near his house in Newington, Connecticut. "He was an expert," says his 85-year-old father, Charles, a retired mechanical engineer. "He mounted them on a board and could tell you the name of every one of them. And that's how he began running—by running after butterflies."

"I was a fanatic, a lepidopterist, like Vladimir Nabokov," Rodgers explained to me while discoursing on the pleasures of the elusive Tiger Swallowtail. "At 12 years old, I'd just run through the fields sweating."

A moment earlier, he had repeated his desire to run Boston in '09, but at a stately pace that might prove as beautiful, in its own way, as his 2:09:27 of 30 years earlier.

Nabokov was nearly as renowned a butterfly expert as he was a writer. But it was another novelist, Rodgers's fellow New Englander, Nathaniel Hawthorne, who wrote: "Happiness is a butterfly which, when pursued, is always just beyond your grasp, but which, if you will sit down quietly, may alight upon you."

He has never been able to sit down quietly. In a chair, Rodgers calls to mind a live butterfly pinned to a board. He thinks he has attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder—one of his two grown daughters has been diagnosed with ADHD. His father says, "I wish he would slow down. He's always flying somewhere."

When I arrange to meet Rodgers for the first time, at his 32- year-old shoe and apparel store in Boston, he has not yet arrived from Logan Airport. "Bill's running late, as usual," says his older brother, Charlie, who presides over the Bill Rodgers Running Center with an air of Eastern mysticism. His white beard—cultivated over four decades—is two feet long and hangs in twin braids that resemble the tasseled tiebacks on theater curtains. "Relax," Charlie tells me. "Relax. Relaxation is the key."

To expedite that effort, he graciously asks if he can get me anything: "Coffee? Scotch?" It is 3:20 in the afternoon. Meyer worked in the store 25 years ago and says of that era: "It was basically a welfare program for runners Bill liked." (When I told Meyer later on the phone that I'd just met Charlie, the first thing he said was: "Did he offer you hard liquor?")

As I wait, a woman comes into the store and asks Charlie if he is Bill Rodgers. Charlie sighs and says, "No. Short legs."

"Charlie got the short legs and the long torso," says his sister, Martha. "Bill got the long legs and the short torso." Their father, who is 6'4" with the posture of a utility pole, got the long legs and torso.

And so I wait for Rodgers. It is possible, though he's lived in Massachusetts for nearly 40 years now, that he has gotten lost on the way from the airport to his own store. On more than one occasion, McGillivray has gotten a call on his cell phone as some running-related dinner got underway only to hear Rodgers, lost and running late, asking for directions. "He's a very lucky man," says McGillivray. "The Boston Marathon course only has five turns. Any more than that, he'd have no victories."

Martha recalls riding shotgun as Bill got lost, for what seemed like hours, on the Silas Deane Highway near their hometown.

But Rodgers eventually arrives at his store, 30 minutes late, still wearing the giveaway T-shirt from a race he'd run in Pittsburgh the night before, the kind of race he makes his living appearing at 42 weeks a year. He hadn't gotten lost. "We have those GPS things these days," he says. And so Bill Rodgers slipped into the Bill Rodgers Running Center unrecognized. At the baggage claim at Logan, a priest had asked him if he was John Rodgers. Says Rodgers, happily: "Nobody knows who I am."

We sit in Charlie's office, a brick-walled phone booth filled with shoes and apparel. There are two office chairs, a desk and a filing cabinet that looks rather more like a defiling cabinet, supporting as it does 30 bottles of single-malt Scotch. "Charlie's a connoisseur," Bill says with a laugh. The Rodgers are Scotch- Irish, tracing their paternal history to a 17th-century bagpiper from Crieff named Patrick Rogie.

Every year after the Boston Marathon, in a tradition that dates back three decades, 45 or more people—Africans, Kazakhs, Japanese, you name the origin—gather in this office that comfortably holds three and drink expensive Scotch from Dixie cups while raising a toast to the race just run. "I can't stand the stuff," Rodgers says of the Scotch. "I'm not much of a drinker. Maybe a gin-and- tonic after a race, or a rum and coke, or a Baileys."

And yet, for a lightweight drinker, Rodgers is at the center of many fine stories involving bars and bartenders. As an undergraduate at Wesleyan, Burfoot would go to bed at 9:30 on Saturday nights and run 25 miles on Sunday mornings. He remembers Rodgers as "a normally talented runner" who would stay out "at bars and discos until 2 or 3" on Saturday nights and join him for the last 10 miles of his Sunday runs.

As roommates, Burfoot and Rodgers were Felix and Oscar. "I remember visiting and seeing Amby's change stacked neatly on his dresser," says Bill's father, Charles. "Bill had a mattress on the floor."

"And a candle-lamp made from a red-wine bottle," says Bill, fairly blushing.

When Burfoot won the Boston Marathon, the victory had no visible effect on his roomie, who notes that the race wasn't even televised 110 miles from Boston, in Middletown, Connecticut. "I don't remember Bill going gaga or asking me a hundred questions," says Burfoot. "There was no such thing as a fawning distance runner in those days. We were all just weirdos."

"People ask, 'Did you know he'd be Bill Rodgers?' The answer is no. How could anyone? What I did recognize was a smooth, relaxed runner, and while I was faster in college, he was perhaps running on a lower percentage of potential than I was."

That percentage of potential would get much lower before it got higher. After graduating from Wesleyan in 1970, Rodgers stopped running, and started smoking two packs of Winstons a day and hanging out in the manifold bars of Boston, where he got around town on a used Triumph 650 motorcycle he had bought with $1,000 borrowed from his best friend.

That friend, Jason Kehoe, works at the Bill Rodgers Running Center and recalls leaving a bar with Rodgers one night "after a few beers" and the two running the final 100 yards of the Boston Marathon course—in street clothes.

For three years, Rodgers would ride his Triumph to the finish In Good Companyline on marathon day and stand there smoking as the racers ran by. "I think watching that had a strange, subtle effect on me," he says now.

One night Rodgers came out of a bar to discover his Triumph had been stolen. He would be forced to rely on his own locomotive powers to get to Brigham and Women's Hospital, where Rodgers—a conscientious objector to the war in Vietnam—worked as a special education teacher. Within a month, he saw a stranger riding his Triumph past the hospital. "I was never a speed guy," says Rodgers, explaining why he didn't give chase. "And I think I recognized it was the best thing that happened to me."

It forced him to start walking, and then running, at first on a track, and then around the city. In 1973, after running for six months, Rodgers found himself in Hopkinton, at the start of the 30-kilometer Silver Lake Dodge road race. Burfoot—who had largely lost touch since college—was surprised to see Rodgers on the starting line, and not merely because he was dressed like a hobo. "He was in tattered khakis, a tattered shirt full of holes, looking like a bum, like a street person," says Burfoot. "I go up to him, he's this happy puppy dog, his tail wagging, and say, 'It's great to see you're jogging. You've stopped smoking. I'm so happy for you. I'll see you at the finish line.'"

Yet 10 miles and 49 minutes into the race, Rodgers and Burfoot were still linked at the elbows like paper dolls. Burfoot looked over at his former roommate in disbelief. Rodgers was a golden retriever giddily running alongside a station wagon. Running in slacks.

"I used to run a lot in blue jeans," Rodgers recalls, before going on the defensive and saying over my laughter: "Hey, they didn't have the good gear back then! Gore-Tex hadn't been invented yet!" But he remembers the race, largely because the Silver Lake Dodge dealership donated the prize: A set of four tires. Or maybe it was just two tires. "That was road-racing," Rodgers says with a laugh. "And I still love that about our sport."

For all the prize money he won, he never prized money. When his apparel business was liquidated in 1988, Rodgers sold his house in Sherborn to the Bank of Boston to pay his debts.

And while he's a good debtor, he's a lousy creditor. When Greg Meyer and his wife had a baby, Rodgers lent his friend $2,000. Three months later, after "winning some races he probably threw me," Meyer tried to repay him.

"I've seen him in a tie more in recent years," says Meyer. "He used to always wear his running shoes and a pair of shorts, and carry a shoulder bag for his racing shoes and extra T-shirts."

His eccentricities of dress and laissez-faire approach to organization still give Rodgers the air of an absentminded professor. Last November, he signed on to run an 8-K in Philadelphia. "The race just went on and on," he recalls. After six miles—9.6 kilometers—he realized he'd joined the wrong starting queue and was actually in the half-marathon. "Really disturbing," Rodgers says, though he ought to be used to it by now.

"He's always lost or in the wrong place," says his friend Bart Yasso.

"It's a miracle he could remember to run 20 miles on a given day, much less the day before or the day after," says Burfoot. Indeed, his father, Charles Rodgers, is an absentminded professor. "He's a mechanical engineer whose mind is always off in quasar land," Charlie Rodgers says of Charles Rodgers.

Likewise, there is a whiff of genius about Bill, who behaves the way Einstein might have if Einstein had been a runner. Thirty minutes after I met him for the first time, Rodgers was removing his shoe midsentence to show me his new orthotics. He rifled his pockets for a quote he'd just torn from USA Today, about the psychological benefits of running outdoors versus running indoors. His pockets were filled with bits torn from newspapers, each the size of a fortune-cookie slip. He reminded me of the comedian Rip Taylor, pulling confetti from his coat pockets.

All of this has not merely endeared Rodgers to other runners and to the public at large: It has worked to his competitive advantage. "Part of me always felt he was dumb as a fox, and I say that in the most complimentary way," says McGillivray. "He is so approachable and so friendly, and that just wiped away his aura. He's not this guy on a pedestal, and that worked in his favor. Other runners got sucked into this idea of, 'We're all here to run this thing together.' And he was right there in the back of the pack. Then all of a sudden, it's time to go and Bill just went and nobody could go with him. From a strategic perspective, he was a genius."

"No!" says Rodgers, when I put this theory to him. "No, no, no! That was never a part of a strategy. You can't really do that. Most runners get along really good. You might have one or two archrivals—Frank Shorter was a rival, but I didn't dislike him. I had no reason to. It's just a footrace, a sport, with a whole ethic of saluting the other guy if you get beat. You just run your best."

And so Rodgers—in jeans and khakis, in that benighted era before Gore-Tex—entered more races.

His bartender friend, Tommy Leonard, founded the Falmouth Road Race, which Rodgers considers the greatest road race in America. "My Bartender Friend Tommy Leonard got me to come down in 1974 by promising me that girls in bikinis handed out water on the course," says Rodgers, who refers to Leonard on every reference as My Bartender Friend Tommy Leonard, as if it were a formal title: Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II. "It was a lie. I got there, and there were no girls in bikinis. But I did get my car towed."

Still, Rodgers beat Marty Liquori at Falmouth that year and won a Waring blender for the effort. He ran the New York City Marathon when it was four loops in Central Park because he loved the Olympics and first prize was a ticket to Athens on Olympic Airways. He didn't win, but those early, uncelebrated New York marathons were their own reward: He was ducking Frisbees and dodging pedestrians and helping to create an event that now annually draws 39,000 runners.

In 1975—two years after running the Silver Lake Dodge in khakis—Rodgers won the Boston Marathon. "One of the things that made him so great was his ability to lock down and focus for months at a time," says Greg Meyer. "Then during the race itself, he was just a freak, with incredible concentration. It goes back to that single-mindedness. When Billy charts a path, it's hard to get him to deviate from it."

"I've read that Michael Phelps is wired like that," says Rodgers. "You follow what you want. You can't always follow other things, but you can focus on what you like. I was lucky to finally find the marathon. It gave me something to sink my teeth into."

Even he struggles to comprehend his two natures: laid-back Bill and laser-focused Bill. "I became intense about the marathon," Rodgers says. "But I am nowhere near that intense in the rest of my life. In fact, I think running is the only way in which I'm competitive. I have a need to run and sometimes I love it. It's probably because I wasn't really good at anything else."

"Billy really didn't have other things to fall back on," says Meyer, who met Rodgers at the IAAF World Cross-Country Championships in Glasgow in 1978. "And I'm guessing that created anxiety at times. Most people hedge their bets with something. Billy never did."

Even Rodgers must be joking when he says Bob Kempainen threw away a promising career in distance running for a misspent life as a physician: "We had this great marathoner, but he wanted to become a doctor! He shouldn't have done that." When I suggest to Rodgers that most people broaden their interests as they grow older, he puts his hands to his eyes to simulate blinders and says: "Not me. I'm very much like this."

It's hard now to fathom how improbable his 1975 Boston victory was. Jason Kehoe, who had drunk-jogged the final yards of the marathon course with Rodgers in 1972, says: "Three years after that night, I'm watching him run the same stretch, but he's winning the Boston Marathon for real. It was unbelievable."

The victory was no more believable to those closest to him. His sister, one year younger, was watching the TV news in Hartford that evening. "They kept saying the name 'Bill Rodgers' and showing all these police motorcycles," says Martha, who could be forgiven for wondering if perhaps he had robbed a bank.

His father was handing out exams that day at Hartford State Technical College, where he was a professor of mechanical engineering. He told his students, in a tone of mild exasperation, "My son is running in that crazy Boston Marathon today." He thought it was a goofy and perhaps dangerous thing to do.

Rodgers stopped four times for water that day and a fifth time to tie his shoe at the base of Heartbreak Hill. Still, he ran 2:09:55, a time he himself did not believe when he found out afterward. "I can't run that fast," he protested.

But he could. In the first five-borough New York City Marathon, in 1976, Rodgers was surprised to see, as he ran up Manhattan's East Side Drive, a set of stairs he had to climb. "We didn't care," he says. "We were running the course blind." He won the race.

In the next five years, Rodgers won four straight New Yorks, three more Bostons, and three times was ranked the world's top marathoner, a streak book-ended by Boston pedestals: The wooden platform for the winner at the finish line in '75, and that porcelain plinth of the dentist's toilet near the starting line the next decade.

For 15 straight years, Rodgers never missed more than two consecutive days of running. But in 2003, on an eight-mile training run on Nantucket the day after His Bartender Friend Tommy Leonard's race, Rodgers's right tibia snapped. He fell like a gunshot victim at the side of the road. He hitchhiked from a seated position—a sweat-soaked, grimacing spectacle with his butt on the ground and his thumb in the air. A teenager in a Jeep finally stopped for him.

"I just get in that mode: Keep goin'," says Rodgers. "Runners are like that, and I think swimmers are, too." He is fascinated by Michael Phelps, his fellow ADHD sufferer. "But I think swimmers mellow," says Rodgers. "Runners don't. Runners just keep going until they expire."

Aside from the broken leg at 55 and a bout of plantar fasciitis at age 40, Rodgers hadn't a single health problem in his adult life. He was in Barbados for a 10-K in December 2007 when his doctor called with grave news: Rodgers had prostate cancer. "I was with a couple of friends, and we were having a lot of fun," he recalls. "And as soon as I got that call, I was like, 'What now?' You don't know what the hell to do."

So what did he do?

"I ran the 10-K," Rodgers says. "That's what you do."

He had surgery a month later, and Rodgers is now trying to raise awareness and money for prostate-cancer research, much as the Susan G. Komen for the Cure foundation has done for breast-cancer research through its race series. But he is realistic in this pursuit. "Women are better organizers than men," he says. "Men are reluctant to talk about these things. We like to hunker down in our caves. I sort of have this gut feeling that we"—he means men—"are doomed to failure."

Still, if anyone can rally runners to a cause, it is Rodgers, who remains by some measures the most popular road racer of all time. Meyer calls him "the Arnold Palmer of our sport," a populist icon who still makes his living at it long after his competitive twilight. "Billy fakes it so well," says Meyer. "Someone will say, 'Bill, I met you four years ago in Des Moines,' and Billy will have that person believing that he remembers meeting him four years ago in Des Moines."

At the Southington (Connecticut) Apple Harvest Festival Road Race last fall, Rodgers ran the five-miler and then spent two hours afterward handing out trophies, thanking sponsors, signing autographs, and posing for photos. When the last supplicant retreated, 92-year-old Frank Kosko approached and said that his son used to run against Rodgers. Bill insisted Frank join us for lunch at the Y. On our way there, Rodgers signed a high-schooler's bib, and the three of them stood there for a moment in their various postures–the 92-year-old, the 61-year-old, and the fresh-legged 16-year-old—looking, in sequence, like one of those evolution- of-man posters.

Burfoot calls Rodgers "the people's champion" and says: "Frank Shorter was the Olympic champion, a little more distant and imperial than Bill, but Bill was the champion of races that the people themselves ran in—Boston and New York and Falmouth. He literally reached out and touched people, like God on Michelangelo's Sistine Chapel, and that was a big part of the spark that created the running boom."

If Bill Rodgers is best remembered for the Boston Marathon, well, the Boston Marathon might be best remembered for Bill Rodgers, too. "Everyone likes the local product," says McGillivray, the marathon's race director. "It's just human nature to get more engaged and more revved up by them. With all due respect to the athletes winning all the races now, as incredible as they are, it's just—from a fan perspective—not the same as it is when the people up front are those you personally know or have seen around town."

"It's not any worse or better now," says McGillivray. "It's just different. I was part of one of the most amazing, incredible, inspiring experiences I've ever had in road racing when Joanie [Benoit Samuelson] ran the [2008 Olympic] Trials here in Boston. She was three-quarters of the way back, but to hear the crowd, it was like the Pope was coming through. It reminded me of a World Series victory parade: Runners were running by, and you'd hear footsteps, then quiet, footsteps, then quiet. Then this continuous roar starts building and here comes Joanie. And that's the way it is with Billy in Boston."

Rodgers is a Red Sox fan who was sorry to see Manny Ramirez get traded last summer. "He just looks like he's having fun," he says of the Sox former left fielder. "He's rich, he's damn good at what he does, and he's a free spirit of a guy."

Remove the rich part, and that's a fair description of Rodgers, who loves the potent cocktail of Patriots' Day: one part Boston Red Sox, three parts Boston Marathon.

We are interrupted, in the Old Curiosity Shop that is the back office of the Bill Rodgers Running Center, by Charlie, who pops his head in and asks Bill to hand him a Steve Prefontaine poster from the box behind him. The box is full of posters, all of Prefontaine, and I think: Pre is the subject of two feature films and Rodgers is the subject of none? Bill grabs a poster and passes it to his brother as if it were a baton.

"I just love this sport," he continues. "Yesterday, outside Pittsburgh, I'm at a race with 700 people, and we all go over to the race director's house afterward and have ice cream and cake in his front yard. What could be better than that? Then six or eight of us went into the guy's house. His name is Mark Courtney. And he's got a little finished basement with the Boston Marathon finish-line logo. He's a family guy with a 4-year-old daughter, and he has a business and works a lot of hours. But somehow or other he still runs at a high level. There was a wide range of us down there: One guy was more of a track athlete, one guy was a lot older. And we had our beer. And look at this." Rodgers pulls the wrinkles out of the T-shirt he's wearing and reads the front for me: "It was called Courtney's Ice Cream Race."

He gets a faraway look, a 26.2-mile stare. "Seven hundred people in Grove City, Pennsylvania, on a Wednesday night to run a 5-K. A 79-year-old lady who came close to an American record. An 80-year-old former minister who has run 2,500 races. And 200 high school kids." Rodgers is beaming. "It was fantastic. Then we all go to Mark's house and eat cake and ice cream. It's the ultimate community event. That's what running is. We're really like baseball. We're ultimately grassroots. We really are. And we were 100 years ago, at the turn of the century. You look at our sport all the way back, there were all these county fairs, and they all had foot races. So running goes back to our ancient roots as people–the cavemen were running– but it also goes back to our American historical roots."

Running is embedded in our DNA. Just ask the boy with the butterfly net. "You only get cheered in running," says Rodgers. "Every other sport, you get booed."

Greg Meyer told me, "Bill finds it genuinely funny that he gets paid to do this." He gets paid to do what he can't help but do, what he still does every day, for 40 to 50 miles a week: run.

Bill Rodgers has stopped chasing butterflies. Four years ago, when he last moved houses, he threw away the 50-year-old board on which he'd pasted his Nabokovian collection. Still, happiness has alighted on him.

Rodgers, twice divorced, remains close to his two daughters, both from his second marriage: 18-year-old Erika and 23-year-old Elise, with whom he would like to run a race someday. "I love being a family man," he says while walking—not running—on a trail near his house in Boxborough, Massachusetts. "I love being a dad."

It's a new year, a year in which he has promised to slow down. Over the preceding months, Rodgers became more circumspect about his plans to run Boston in '09. As the weather got colder and his training necessarily curtailed—"I hate running indoors"—he decided not to run. "My health is good as far as I know," he says.

"And I'm running a lot of half-marathons. I was running one in Melbourne, Florida— February's USA Master's Half-Marathon where he finished fourth in his age group in 1:34:16—"and during the race I was thinking, This is pretty hard. I'm content just to do halves right now."

So the butterfly catcher really has slowed down.

Or has he? One minute uttering the preceding quote, Rodgers is talking, in his store, about the glorious 60-degree morning which he spent driving the Boston Marathon course with a photographer. "It really got the memories and the competitive part of me going," he says in that faraway dreamer's voice. He pauses, sighs, continues: I still might change my mind about Boston."

Either way, he can't go wrong. If he runs, he knows he'll be carried along by the crowd. "I hear everything people say," he acknowledges. "A lot of people recognize me on the course, and cheer for me—'You're doing great, you're doing great'—and it lifts me up when I'm feeling terrible. And it's a huge advantage. A huge advantage."

And if he doesn't run—well that doesn't mean he's forsaken winning all the spoils. ON the contrary. When I left him at teh Y in Southington that day last fall, he was the center of a quintessentially Bill Rodgers-esgue tableau: Seated between 92-year-old lunch companion he had just met and an elfin plastic trophy on a faux marble base for the winner of the 60-to-64 age group. In front of Rodgers was a five-pound spackler's bucket of chili from the El Sombrero Mexican restaurant that race officials had given to him to take home.

In that moment, he looked as content as any man can be. When I suggested as much, he looked at me over the chili bucket, raised his plastic trophy, and said, smiling: "Victory is sweet."